in reply to Blurry Moon

@sun I remember when they actually debunked this but the internet still didn't believe it and still keeps pretending that this was a thing

> They told us the death was initially recorded as a COVID-19 death after the victim tested positive. After the medical examiner and epidemiologist reviewed the death, they say they removed it from the COVID fatality list.

wusa9.com/article/news/verify/…

in reply to feld

the claim is that you can show that the inclusion process is incredibly bad and permissive not that there were secretly one million motorcycle crashes skewing covid numbers. people found a particularly bad one, and only AFTER a specific one was found, they got embarrassed and removed that single one.

furthermore tons of studies are based on scraping VAERS and there is no pre-verification at all.

It is now, or, depending on your Timezone, just was, John Mastodon Day.

Here’s an appropriate song for the celebration. Enjoy!

John Mastodon (ft. Andre Louis [@Onj])
~#Dgar
dgar.bandcamp.com/track/john-m…

Grab a copy. It’s free.

#DgarMusic #JohnMastodonDay #JohnMastodon #Dgar #Music #Anthem #Bandcamp

This entry was edited (5 days ago)

reshared this

There has been a lot of talk about "raccoon domestication" lately because of one sciencey article discussing it and I saw there was this TikTok or whatever video with a caption like "I'm a raccoon biologist and this is why raccoon domestication is never gonna happen"

Ok sorry you lost me there you are a "raccoon biologist"? I'll believe raccoons can talk before I believe you have a full time career as a "raccoon biologist". There's no way you're making a living in that speciality this has to be a hoax video

Top 5 #accessibility improvements in #GNOME Calendar 49:

1. Focus indicators were added in various places
2. Events are focusable with a keyboard
3. Year/month spin buttons are navigable with arrow keys
4. Calendar grids are skippable with Tab, and cells are wrapped via keyboard focus
5. Calendar list box now behaves like a check box

For screen readers: events and year/month spin buttons have proper semantics!

donate.gnome.org/

#a11y #GNOMECalendar #FOSS #OpenSource #FreeSoftware

in reply to GNOME

Thank you to:

@TheEvilSkeleton (tesk.page/#donate) - who developed the features.

@nekohayo - who outlined all the accessibility issues in detail, and testing it thoroughly.

@tyrylu - who explained how to use some of the accessibility APIs in GTK.

Georges Stavracas - who is single-handedly maintaining the codebase and reviewed the contributions.

and many other contributors.

Fancy a digital chastity belt?

The UK government wants Apple and Google to stop you from taking or sending pics of your bits.

Intrusive scanning tech on your phone would block nudes unless you verify your age with biometrics or official ID.

It's creepy mission creep.

arstechnica.com/tech-policy/20…

#surveillance #ageverification #privacy #digitalrights #ukpolitics #ukpol #apple #google

Across India, 118 million adult women in 12 states now receive unconditional cash transfers from their governments, making India the site of one of the world's largest and least-studied social-policy experiments.

Long accustomed to subsidising grain, fuel and rural jobs, India has stumbled into something more radical: paying adult women simply because they keep households running, bear the burden of unpaid care and form an electorate too large to ignore.

bbc.com/news/articles/c5y9ez3k…

On today's episode of are you fucking kidding me?: I'm trying to get a Texas ID. On the website, it states that an ID from a different state can be used as one of the documents that you can use for the process along with a social security card and birth certificate. My visit to the DMV told me different. Apparently, because my ID from California that I got in 2020 which doesn't expire until 2027, wasn't a "real" ID, as in the newer ID's that are required for something like flying, isn't a viable form of indentification, and yet the pamphlet that was referenced and website say otherwise. "federal limits don't apply." was what the guy said. Iff this is true, information needs some serious updating.

If you fancy a game over Christmas, you might want to try this. It is a similar concept I built for the ZX Spectrum back in the 80's. I get a pretty decent score. Quoting ChanceyFleet I'm a Blind tech educator but this is my first game design! If you support Blind or low-vision learners, please consider sharing the retro audio Space Invaders game i built with Gemini and @Marconius — you can play with any screen reader, right in the browser. I wanted to build something with a simple interface and a progressively hard game mechanic so it would be fun for tech novices and for me. The game is free and open-source and we welcome your feedback. marconius.com/fun/audioInvader…

We just transitioned CoSocial from an ad-hoc combo of AWS, OVH, and DO to @fedihost, see fedihost.co, a Managed Fediverse Hosting outfit based in Canada and with no US dependencies. Already feels faster, and should be cheaper too. Self-managed instances are cool but not, I suspect, the general-case future.
This entry was edited (5 days ago)

Is the small market justification for the cost of #AssistiveTechnology still valid in 2025, or is it an easy copout for companies to continue charging high prices? #Accessibility #A11y

  • Yes, it's still valid (50%, 1 vote)
  • No, this argument is no longer valid. We have found ways to make these tools more affordable. (50%, 1 vote)
2 voters. Poll end: 4 days ago

Two reasons why I think it's unwise to move from Firefox.

First, browser engine diversity matters. If all browsers become chromium skins, this gives Google a very unfortunate amount of power. It can affect web standards, de facto web use, all kinds of things; and there's no guarantee chromium will keep being freely released.

Second, pretty much any other possible alternative is worse across a set of metrics that involve accessibility, access to source code, privacy, and safety.

Servo is promising, but a11y isn't there; so it may as well not exist for me.

This entry was edited (5 days ago)

I'm a Blind tech educator but this is my first game design! If you support Blind or low-vision learners, please consider sharing the retro audio Space Invaders game i built with Gemini and @Marconius — you can play with any screen reader, right in the browser. I wanted to build something with a simple interface and a progressively hard game mechanic so it would be fun for tech novices and for me. The game is free and open-source and we welcome your feedback. marconius.com/fun/audioInvader…
in reply to Scott

@Scott Not at the moment unless you navigate up and focus on the gameplay HUD. I need to group those together into single focus elements, and was considering adding a key shortcut for an energy announcement, plus am working on adding a danger noise so you know when you are about to lose. Also realizing that I should make the high scores list inert during gameplay to clean up the interface for us screen reader users. :)

I've just made a MR to document the remaining AT-SPI DBus interfaces. I'll wait a while before I merge it in case anyone wants to look it over (and it would probably be good if it is looked over by people who are not me). gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/at-spi2…
in reply to James Scholes

The issue for this delightful behaviour:

github.com/InfiArtt/accessify-…

Unknown parent

@Bri I don't fully agree with you on this one. The add-on is legitimately useful when it works, and the alternative would be a separate (probably huge) app with global keyboard input, gesture remapping, speech output, etc. needing to be rebuilt.

That said, it does a lot of add-on stuff wrong, like implementing its own autoupdate mechanism for some reason. And the whole not currently working thing.

My issue with firefox soft forks is that even in their most ideal form, they can only be reactive harm-reduction, and any reasonable fork necessitates compromises that introduce some amount of risk (delayed security updates, compromised trust anchors etc.)

Perhaps that is the best anyone can do within reasonable costs.

Perhaps the only affordable proactive actions we can take is to reinforce that front against future inevitable assaults.

Perhaps that must be enough. I wish it were not so.

in reply to Sarah Jamie Lewis

I've spent time this year gaming out other possible strategies with people. Because the question of "no seriously how do we move forward in a world where every single mainstream browser engine is aligned towards making the web worse?" is one of the important ones.

The only viable path I can see requires that a collection of organizations/soft-forks commit to co-maintaining a shared base browser fork of firefox (something like the base browser used by Tor for TB and Mullvad)

Need to send someone their favourite animal, butt only the backside? Want to learn various animal names in Bernese Swiss German? Just want silly stickers?

This fops got you covered!

presenting to you: the Füdliverse!

Available at tailwag.ch/stickers/Fuedlivers… (Signal and Matrix not up to date yet), have fun!